


Only God Knows Where We Stuck

by roachpatrol



Series: The Pimps In The Crib [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bloodplay, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyandry, Threesome - F/M/M, Xenophilllia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-19
Updated: 2011-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-19 14:29:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The light streams down golden and warm and paints these kids beautiful and familiar and strange and precious, pink petals caught in their midnight hair, brownish bark-smears against the angular gray shapes of their lizard-thin bodies. They’re perfect because they're <i>his</i>, somehow, and he can trust himself to that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only God Knows Where We Stuck

**Author's Note:**

> Timestamp/Sequel to [ We're Looking For Something Dumb To Do](http://archiveofourown.org/works/175421), written for [Urban Anchorite](http://archiveofourown.org/users/t_ZM/pseuds/urbanAnchorite), who is the Starsky to my Hutch or the Hutch to my Starsky, depending on which of them is the one that encourages the other one to never feel bad about how crazy they are.

Dave Strider is in the Afternoon Atrium when it happens. 

Equius and Rose had done some funky thing with the lighting in the Veil, setting their meteor lab turned meteor mansion up so that it was a hot high noon on the top levels and a dank cave-y sort of midnight on the lowest, and all the multi-level cavernous hangars and cloning stations and observatories and weirdass huge mystery room type places have been given over to gardening whatever the hell would like best whatever the hell lighting it happened to be getting-- he and Harley have a pretty cool cactus garden going on in Gilla Flats, and if he never in a million paradox years finds himself in the Midnight Boogaloo again it will be too goddamn soon.

But so, he's in the Afternoon Atrium with Aradia, Rose, and Kanaya, force-growing apple trees. Kanaya has a sheaf of complicated charts and graphs; Rose has a wheelbarrow full of what could be charitably described as fertilizer if Dave didn't like the term 'troll shit' so much, a shovel, and a distinctly long-suffering expression; and he and his girl Hellacious A. Megido have a handful of apple seeds and the powers of supremely useful gods.  
  
Dave's up in the thin, whippy branches of a young apple tree with Aradia, coaxing it gently higher, when suddenly there is a sound that is not so much a sound as a sensation, like the sounds ears make to themselves when you hold on to your nose and pop them, and the trolls explode into joyous noise. Kanaya screams and flings her arms around Rose, down on the ground, and the ground itself goes down and down and  down as Aradia does the universe's least cute rendition of  _ I'm A Little Teapot _ and the tree goes straight up like a freight-train with delusions of grandeur. Every limb throws out a million branches which all throw out a million twigs which then throw out a million zillion blossoms, a confetti tornado of pink and white petals exploding out through the sourceless golden afternoon light.

"She hatched," Aradia finally deigns to lyricize her composition of  _ Fuck Dave's Eardrums_, "she  _hatched_ ,  Dave!"

She flings herself at him, and while a solid year of living with everyone's crazy alien mojo has dialed the effects back from  Pants On Fire to  Hello Yes Please , a rapturous hug still turns into a pretty intense bout of being shoved up against a widening trunk and being treated to ringside seats at a tonsil hockey cage-match, and since this is a troll cage-match it involves chainsaws and machetes and clubs with knives taped to the ends.

"Please stop kissing me or I'm going to have sex with you," Dave gasps, his voice a good deal higher and less threatening than he'd actually meant it to be. Romantic fidelity is a complete  _ bitch _ when the brain chemistry of you and the aliens you’ve shacked up with fit together like puzzle pieces and the picture those pieces make is just graphic illustrations from the Space Kama Sutra. 

"Oh," Aradia says, looking deeply conflicted, "I'll just, I'll, uh--"

"Equius," Dave says, his conscience just barely winning its argument with his dick. 

"Right," she says, and blinks guiltily out of his timeframe.

In the petal-strewn shade of the enormous apple tree, Kanaya has Rose pinned flat against the grass and is ravaging her entirely unprotesting throat.

"Get a fucking room!" Dave shouts down, not inclined to be kind, and they jolt apart like cats under the impact of a water balloon.

"My apologies," Kanaya stammers, "I don't know what came over me--"

"No," Rose says back, "I'm sorry, please don't st-- alarm yourself--"

"Are you quite alright--"

"I assure you I'm  _ perfectly _ fine--"

"You're... ah, you're bleeding..."

"Was that your first kiss?" Dave wants to know, and is subjected to the dick-incineratingly scary combo of Lalonde and Maryam glaring at him at the same time with perfectly equal levels of just-barely-restrained homicidal misanthropy.

Dave ducks back around the curve of the treelimb, and the Sylph of Space disappears with a pop of displaced air and also Dave's sister.

Dave should not have pissed off both of the teleporting players who know where he is, because Dave is now thirty feet up a giantass tree and his turntech timegear is all down at the base of it, right where he’d left it when he had been only about six feet up a little tree.

He makes a note to alchemize some kind of badass expanding wristwatch version as soon as possible, and settles in for everyone to get bored with having sexy troll grubmom parties-- it should only be a week or so, he figures. Worst case scenario, someone’s going to want an apple _eventually_. 

Terezi comes to find him before he can get too bored, fortunately, Karkat in tow, possibly even more fortunately.

“How’s my coolest coolkid?” she calls up.   
  
“Approximately as bitching as usual, if not even more bitchin’ than that. What’s the haps, Tez?”

"We're celebrating the fact that this incomprehensibly shitty pile of abject failures I deign to call my team has found it impossible to fail at everything forever!" Karkat shouts. "Come down so I can fuck your brains out, Human!"

"Yeah, pass," Dave says.

"We brought your favorite pail!" Terezi calls, and Dave peers warily over the branch, and, yeah, they really did, it's the lime-green one with the pink glitter in the plastic and the unicorn decals all over that makes Karkat have a ragegasm pretty much any time he happens to catch the faintest glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye. Either he's mellow as  _ fuck _ over this grubmom thing or he and Terezi have already had it off a couple times before coming to find their human sextoy. Make that like, a dozen or so times.

"Not even the work of art that is that pail can tempt me," he tells them, "because while you were off having yourself some crazy troll bullshit disco I have fallen in love with this tree. We are now applesprites and no you can't come to my wedding so don't even ask."

Terezi kicks her shoes off. "Objection!" she calls up, cracking her knuckles. "The mighty Terezi Pyrope attends whatever human weddings she feels like!"

"On what grounds?"

"It is the very first rule of the noble tome of law shenaniganry that is the body of Terezi Pyrope!"

"Yeah well it's a tree wedding," he tells her. "They don't let skinny little hatchet-faced trolls in the tree chapel. It's totally against their religions and shit: book one, verse one, Terezi Pryope is not invited because she smells like someone left a pickle to die in a swamp."

"The mighty Terezi Pyrope takes no sass from tree bigots, either!" she shouts. "It is rule _ two_."

She shins up the tree like a little gray lizard, all teeth and claws, or actually more like those squirrels that get horrible mange and die on someone's porch and then the dipshit thinks it's chupacabra. 

"I have severe doubts about the long-term prospects of this relationship, Dave, as this tree is going to be alive in a hundred years and you probably will not be and also, this tree is a total jerk. Is there anything I can do to win you back from the attentions of such an immodest specimen?" she asks through that alligator grin of hers, stalking towards him and also her shirt kind of vanishing off somewhere. In the dappled golden light she nearly blends in with the bark, silver and gray and a petal-white slash of fangs, and  oh what a battle hymn of a girl she is, his Terezi, her small high breasts and the rattlesnake curves of her hips and those clavicles you could skin a man with.  

"Can't think of much, no," he drawls and oh, fancy that, his back is against the trunk already.  

How convenient. 

"Not fair!" Karkat shouts, from far below.

Kanaya is prettier. Aradia is softer. Rose and Jade are a great deal more human. But Terezi fits between his arms like she belongs there, small and sharp and lovely as a toy made out of staple guns just for him, and she kisses him like they’re the ones that invented the whole concept of fucking and then they  _ patented _ that shit. She tastes of pickles and peppers, fire and acid, sour and spicy but mostly intense, and she makes the most obscene breathy growl when he tips his head back and lets her at his neck. He can feel his blood heat up just from her touch, feel it start to sing the sickest of songs, and he wraps his hands around her perfectly hand-sized horns and lets her do her thing. 

“Pretty up here,” she murmurs, licking a fleck of his blood off her lips, bucking her horns lazily up into his grasp. “Gray and pink and gold and green and candy-- let it never be said my coolkid has bad taste.”

Karkat arrives in a cacophonous scramble of shredding bark and nervous cursing, and Dave glances over Terezi’s head to see him clawing his way up towards them with absolutely zero finesse, his eyes gone slit-pupiled with fear. 

“Never climbed a tree, Karkles?”

“Never felt like entertaining a particularly retarded death wish,” he grunts, finally scrambling over the curve of their limb and sprawling like a drowned rat. 

“He’s scared of heights,” Terezi says. 

“I’m not fucking scared of heights, I’m scared of pancakes, specifically  _ becoming _ one, which is a perfectly reasonable goddamn fear that normal people have and thus I am entirely unsurprised that you pan-rotted suicidal freaknubs are having a fucking blast up here.”

“Awww,” Dave drawls, and hitches his chin over:  _ come here_ , and Karkat gets gingerly to his feet and comes. If Terezi’s a battle hymn than Karkat’s what would happen if you could distill rebellion down into the kind of moonshine that makes you go blind, all sound and sour fury bottled up into soft gray suede, into narrow ribs and clinging hands and the world’s most gorgeous sneer. Get him a leather jacket and he could make a million motorcycle fetishists cream their chaps with one furious curl of those thin black lips. In his wary gaze is the smouldering fire of a dog who has been kicked enough times that the next fucker who takes a swing is going to be down a goddamn leg. 

Dave sees that burn any time he cares to meet the gaze of his own reflection, which kind of takes some of the novelty off. 

He and Terezi tuck the boy between them, Terezi pulling his shirt off and then his pants, Dave wrapping his arms tightly around Karkat’s thin ribs and getting a leg between his thighs. Karkat mumbles “Oh,  _ fuck_,” his breath already a quick high series of gasps, and rocks the soft roundness of his ass against Dave’s dick. He is so beautiful to break apart, all that anger curling out uselessly through the cracks.

“Is it too late for us to join you in your applesprite matrimony, Dave?” Terezi mumbles, licking along the shell of Karkat’s pointed ear, making him shudder hard between them.

“We’re pretty flexible,” Dave tells her. “Ask nice enough and I’ll put in a good word with the missus, okay?”

“ _Why are we doing this standing up_ ,” Karkat wails, and then goes “Oh oh oh  _ fuck  _ you guys,” when Terezi and Dave grab a horn each and squeeze. 

“So are you guys gonna go into heat or what?” Dave asks. 

“I am always hot,” Terezi says with deep satisfaction. 

“Girl I do  _ not  _ need to be told that.”

“Heheh.”

“I mean, your pimpmaster hivequeen lady, are you going to get all jiggy with it now that she’s ready to lay your unholy spawn?”

“You are making noise,” Karkat gasps, digging his claws into Terezi’s shoulders. “Stop it. Stop it and fuck me.”

Terezi laughs again. “No, she’s not ready for that, Dave, she just hatched, she’s still a wriggler herself! A baby. We’re just-- Dave, we can feel her, in our heads, we can feel that there’s a  _ future _ in there now. I didn’t know that we were all so empty, until we weren’t!”

And whatever crazy troll new-age hippie hivemind thing Terezi’s got going on, it’s something real, it’s changed her, in some subtle way: there’s a clearness to her blind eyes, something ever so slightly more sincere to her grin, something just a little easier to each of her breaths. Karkat seems completely high with it, his eyes heavy-lidded, his head nodding to some inaudible song and the strangest most satisfied little smile curling his lips even as he curses and writhes up between them. 

“Can--” Dave starts, but obviously no, obviously he can’t, he’s human and if there’s one thing that humans do best it is groove to the beat of their own personal drummers and absolutely no one else’s. Terezi’s smile goes soft with pity and she leans up over Karkat to kiss him, gently, like a human would. 

Dave bites her tongue, hard, and she squeals with delight and digs her claws into his bicep. Karkat gets squished up between them and  _ wriggles_, keening desperately, and they almost overbalance off the limb and to one of the more embarrassing deaths in paradox space. 

“See,” Karkat pants, dragging them all down to sit on the limb, “See, see, I told you chumploads, why doesn’t anyone listen to me?”

“We are dangerous and exciting people who live dangerous and exciting lives!” Terezi says, at the same time as Dave says “You’re king of Stupidtopia and all your edicts are made of retard yawns.”

“Fuck you guys,” Karkat says, and crawls into Dave’s lap for some personal attention. 

He’s getting bigger, lately, at least a good third bigger than Terezi but still pint-sized, and it is simple and easy and nice just to have him right close and personal and rubbing the heel of his hand with a practiced ease up against Dave’s tenting jeans, it feels good to coax out all those little deranged-pigeon noises he makes when Dave gets his hands around the curves of his blunt, velvety horns. The light streams down golden and warm and paints these kids beautiful and familiar and strange and precious, pink petals caught in their midnight hair, brownish bark-smears against the angular gray shapes of their lizard-thin bodies. They’re perfect because they're  _his_ , somehow, and he can trust himself to that. 

Then Terezi pulls out the sparkly green bucket and Karkat moans. He leans back and snatches the bucket out of her hands and throws it over the tree limb, and watches with deep satisfaction as it falls all the way to the far-off ground below. 

“....I cannot believe you just did that.” Terezi says, something very much like nonplussed. 

“I am never using that thing again,” Karkat says. “Twice was two times too many.  _ Three _ times too many.”

“I love that bucket,” Dave says, leaning back on his arms. “I am not having sex with anyone now, I am in mourning.”

“Well, coincidentaly,” Karkat says, and decaptchalogues a perfectly normal pail in standard black. 

“I am being so fucking culturally sensitive right now,” he says, and there is the most tentative edge to his smug leer. 

Terezi collapses with laughter and Dave even kind of grins. “You have no idea how hot I get for cultural sensitivity, Karkles.”

“Oh?” he says cautiously. 

Dave squeezes Karkat’s ass. “Oh, totally. I am pretty much sitting here in a pile of lace and sodden panties, swooning, over that masterful display of tact and decency, all ‘oh Karkat take me now, you majestic diplomatic alien stallion, teach me your glorious ways of assimilating so perfectly into that wacky human culturejam but be gentle, it is my first time.’”

“There is not one word out of a hundred that comes out of your fucked-up bonebulge that is not complete and entire human horseshit, is there?”

“Maybe  _ one_,” Dave says.  

“Maybe half of one,” Terezi says fondly, and rolls over to bite Karkat’s hip. 

“Give me a blowjob,” Dave says. “There, that’s four.”

“Well,” Karkat says, “Well then,” and he must be  _so_ _high_ because he slides down Dave’s body, peels open his fly. 

Terezi catches the microsecond Dave allows himself to be shocked for and cackles. She rolls over and scoops Karkat’s pail into her own lap, and hunches eagerly forward to watch. 

“No teeth,” Dave warns, still a little wary after all this time and Karkat just mutters “Fuck you,” and presses his black lips to Dave’s overheated cock. 

It feels as decadently good as always, if not better. Karkat hums to himself, just a little, pressing kiss after kiss to his shaft, soft and wet, minding his teeth, the pads of his fingers splaying gently over his stomach, and then he totally fails to dig in his claws  _ anywhere _ and it gets weird. 

Dave prickles all over, almost-- uneasy, uncomfortable?-- _disquieted_ , when Karkat meets his gaze through the dark sweep of eyelashes and  _ holds _ it. He doesn’t know what to do and Karkat won’t stop  _ looking _ at him, just quietly, like this doesn’t break every rule they have about how they’re only tolerating each other for Terezi and also bitchin’ brain-chemical alien sex.  

“I,” Dave says, and “uh,” and Karkat snickers and licks a burning hot wet stripe up the underside of his shaft, and Dave maybe squeaks a little and claps his hand over his mouth. 

“Didn’t catch that, coolkid,” Karkat murmurs, and his hands come up across Dave’s body to catch his wrists and pull them down to his sides and he’s  _ still  _ not using his  _ claws.   
_  
This is  _ so _ illegal, Dave thinks hazily, as Karkat licks and kisses and nuzzles, his eyes like yellow headlamps all not looking away, staring him fucking down, light at the end of the tunnel all being a goddamn train and he is a deer standing in the middle of the road making some truly embarrassing squeaky strangled sex noises and Terezi is  _ laughing _ at him and this is not going to end well, is never going to end well.

Karkat hesitates, finally looking away, finally looking down, and Dave can breathe agan. Then the boy coughs, just a little, and mutters, “You’re not our sex toy, you know.”

Dave scowls. “I’m a really fucking _good_ sex toy.”

He huffs out what might be a laugh, might be a growl. “You’re not anyone’s  _toy_ , you dumb bilgefucker.”

“Fuck you,” Dave says, “Fuck you, god, _shut_ _up_ ,” and he pulls Karkat up by his hold on his wrists and bites Karkat’s mouth, hard and savage, twisting his head a little to give his too-dull canines every scrap of leverage. Karkat whines and struggles, getting desperate when Dave kicks his legs apart and introduces the hard edge of his knee, and he just bites and bites as hard as he can until Karkat has worn down to nothing but a sobbing mess of desire, until the sounds coming out of him make nothing like sense and his claws are digging out slick red ribbons across his shoulders, till the world is nothing but the scent of sweat and blood and fire and the burning acid hunger of their wacky alien pheromones pimping it in the crib and dropping it like it is motherfucking _ hot. _

And then Karkat tucks his head into Dave’s shoulder and wraps his arms around his chest and cries, “Fuck, _Dave god please oh fuck_ \--”

And Dave kind of comes without even being touched down there, and also maybe possibly gasps something like Karkat’s name while he does so. 

Maybe.

There’s a long, fraught uncertain silence, then, as Karkat looks up at him.

“I’m no one’s toy,” Dave says, reluctantly compelled to some passing third cousin of sincerity, “I’m a motherfucking power tool, okay? All quad-rotating blades and dual action pump weilding and shit, I know.” He gives Karkat a soft humankind sort of kiss, like how he thinks maybe it’s supposed to go: a soft suction of lips, a slow and gentle sweep of tongue. Karkat shudders and relaxes a bit, minding his own teeth, still so strangely pliant, his nails not even breaking the skin of Dave’s arms. 

“As long as you  _ know_ _,_ ” he murmurs. “That’s all.”

He breaks free almost reluctantly, with a furtive, almost  coy lick at the gashes along one of Dave’s shoulders, then scoots away and over to Terezi. She hauls him-- practically _ abducts _ him-- into that birdlike courting-gesture pail thing of theirs, legs entwined, heads bowed together. 

She’s pretty far gone, with the free show and the having to sit there holding the bucket and all, she’s been pared down to a set of desperately terse ritualized gestures, a threshing machine made of a hungry rictus and a set of eager claws. She devours the curve of Karkat’s neck, rakes bright gashes down his back, already dripping a thick stream of her own turquoise blood down her pointed chin. Karkat’s gotten pretty fucked up his own self, though, and soon they are making beautiful nightmare troll magic together: an explosion in a paint factory, doors locked up from the outside and all the workers burning to death slow and gruesome.

Dave sits back against the trunk of the tree and lets them have at it, enjoys the warm tingle of golden light on on his skin and afterglow in his brain, the gentle sway of the limb beneath him and the way Karkat and Terezi use _ bulgestain  _ and  _nookstink_ and  _freak-faced descendant of a beastfucker_ as tender endearments. 

They climax squeaking like kittens, well, demon kittens, horrorterror kittens, but it manages to be fairly adorable, and this is Dave’s life, smiling at two little monsters with a bucket full of blood and his pants full of bark. 

Karkat captchalogues the pail almost  _reverently_ , and then he and Terezi look at each other and  _giggle_ , their hands twining together like little kids. 

“Not yet,” Karkat says, still this weird happy-wondering smile Dave’s never quite seen on there before. 

“Not  _ yet_,” Terezi says, smiling it too. 

Dave thinks about Rose, down on the grass with Kanaya, tall and slender fourteen-year-old Rose, and Jade, who still sleeps with a pile of plush squiddles and is ninety pounds soaking wet. Not yet: no, no, not _ fair_, to hang the ghosts of six billion people on the shoulders of his two friends like that, to set the future of that race into the infinitely mortal curvature of their hips. Eve did it all by herself, sure, but she had the benefit of not being real.

“Not yet for you guys, too?” Terezi asks, coming up to lay her head on his shoulder, and for one terrible moment he wants to smash out every glittering white shard of her grin. Then she turns her head and rasps her tongue softly over his sore, scabbing cuts, that crazy alien troll-spit soothing away the pain, and he can’t feel anything but the usual aching, giddy, gloating tenderness. 

“We’re fine with being the last,” he says, maybe lying, maybe  deciding , and lets Karkat settle in on his other side, a carelessly heavy weight, lets him start attending to the gashes on that side. “We’re going to go out with style, show you tragically unhip fucks how to hold a proper coolkid extinction. I’m thinking we’ll get a pinata, maybe some questionably spiked ecto cooler--”

“But that’s not  _ fair_ _!_ ” Karkat interrupts.

“I  _ like _ pinatas,” Dave says, maybe a little warningly, but Karkat just bonks the curve of his forehead up against Dave’s jaw, and gives his shoulder another series of businesslike licks.

“In all possible universes of horror that could have befallen us,” Karkat says, carefully, deliberately, “being saddled with you pink weirdos is not entirely the worst of them.”

“We’ll make the John human figure it out,” Terezi says, careless, confident. She pulls Dave into her arms and plants a loud, messy, pink-tinged smooch on his cheek.

“Yeah,” Dave says, weirdly reassured, weirdly _ touched. _

“So, you have no idea how to get down from here, do you?” Terezi murmurs into his ear.

“Nope,” Dave admits. He feels, suddenly, deeply at peace with the universe. 

“Me neither,” Terezi says. “I’m only good at climbing up.”

“Fuck,” Karkat sighs, and drops his cheek to Dave’s chest. “There goes _ my _ afterglow.”

Dave smiles, wraps an arm around both of them. 

The light is the heavy gold of a perfect, lazy afternoon, and will be so forever, if his friends have anything to say about it; if his friends have anything to say about anything. He sits with a beautiful sleepy monster tucked against either side and watches the petals rain down until they are rescued. 


End file.
